The Confessions of an Aspiring Artist

Beauty can be found in the simplest things in life. Art can be made of the most trivial little details of the world. Art can be made from life. The making of art gives meaning to all these things.

Or at least that’s what I’d like to say, being an artist. Everyone wants to feel important, like the things they do–or create–have significance

I constantly am in notice of small details. I remember the simple things in life. I eat a dinner and slowly chew. I stare in awe at the little black shadows formed where grains of white rice overlap. I am inspired to a pattern; there is an incredible balance in the rounded ellipses of the white rice and the concave deltas of the black shadows. They create patterns which are logical. They create patterns which are meaningless. They create the food of my thoughts for the next hour.

It’s always so easy to imagine yourself doing something which you never do. You never even try to do that thing you imagined. I imagined my self sketching the rice, savoring that moment when it was arranged on my plate in a way it would never be arranged in again. But, the thought was too absurd. I had been calmly eating dinner for an hour. I was supposed to be eating dinner, not staring at rice, not observing rice, not admiring rice.

Being an artist, it is in my nature to observe. Inspiration comes from the most unexpected places, they say. I walk around in a random small-town parking lot, the kind that isn’t very paved. I am always looking down, looking up, and looking around me when I walk. Sometimes I become self-conscious of my observation; no one else I see seems to move their head around as much when they walk. But I must take full use of my own eyes.

It is this way in this parking lot. I feel the bumps of the little rocks below me, and suddenly I am drawn to their attention more than the sparse cars, more than the placid sky, more than the little rustic castaway furniture store. I see these rocks are variegated in shades of gray. There are many grays. But, every few rocks there is a perfectly brown-orange one. I am in awe of the way these rocks are arranged. In an instant, I stare. In an instant, I think.

I look at the rocks around. The whole parking lot has these same rocks scattered about, but in a cursory scan, I feel that no other patch of this lot is arranged nearly to the perfection of the one I stand on. There are too-numerous brown-orange rocks clumped together. There are too-vast expanses of gray rocks. This chance deeply humbles me, and I muse my gratitude for the small things in life.

I have played through such scenes in their entirety, continually. I am never truly bored because I am always occupied. People around me see me standing frozen looking down at the ground. People around see me with a faraway gaze. Perhaps I waste my time. I am looking for something which is not there; a meaning to it all.

But I live for the novelty of seeing more rocks, and I am constantly creating the nature of my mind. I create the structure of my thoughts. I observe, and I remember. Anything that can make a mark can sketch. Life is a tool to draw a portrait of existence. And the making of art gives meaning to these things.

Or at least that’s what I’d like to believe, being an artist.

October 11, 2009 at 12:16 pm | Lifepost, Reflections | No comments

Improvement Efficiency

The Dragon’s Scales

In a far long gone-by event, I had caught myself staring at an even further gone-by drawing of a dragon. There was nothing spectacular about this drawing of a dragon. The pose was static. The perspective was bland, making the picture flat. The pencil shading was more or less standard.

Specifically though, I had remembered that at one point, this picture was one in which I had dedicated multiple uncounted hours. Now, while multiple hours may be incomparable to the time spent by some artists on some of their keystone masterpieces, a stale, unspectacular picture of a dragon did not seem to require such time.

At some point, this picture of a dragon had many rather semi-hexagonal scales strewn crudely through the entirety of its body in pencil. In the end though, this painstaking effort did not contribute to the appearance of the picture as the scales had mostly been smudged away by time. Even in the beginning, the scales felt to be a futile effort. Not because they smudged away. Such things could be prevented.

Purpose

The addition of the scales was only one that could enhance the specific picture and nothing more. The scales were not drawn out in a thoughtful way. Their main attraction was to draw the awe of viewers who sympathized with the time spent.

No stride in improvement of technical skill was made through the rendering of the scales. Perhaps muscle memory of drawing the semi-hexagonal shapes in a specific pattern was gained, but such was little reward for the effort spent.

When catching myself staring, thinking of the old scales on the dragon picture, I wondered why I had drawn the scales in the first place.

I knew I was not a fully-fledged and technically knowledgeable artist. Why had I spent my time with such idlings as drawing out the scales on a dragon?

Goal-Oriented

The thing I vividly remembered most was that through all those past days of doodling little scales on dragons and other fanciful such things, I believed my goal in art was to improve.

So, I sat there thinking of how many artists improved by doing studies. The main thing that separated me from them was that I had not made an attempt to analyze the appearance of the world around me as I sketched.

And, I simply sat there wondering. What kind of approach to improvement might be more effective than drawing scales on a dragon? How does one efficiently improve technical art skill?

All the same, I wonder whether a true practitioner of the form may ever need bother themselves with such things, and thus I wonder if one such as myself may be better suited in the classification of an observer of the art world. Then again, if the goal of an artist is to achieve realism, would not a practitioner do well to consider how to achieve the state of being capable of imitating the world?

In the end, all I can say is that if an artist’s goal is truly to imitate the real world, then it would seem that analyzing the appearance of the world through studies is truly the path to improvement.

December 29, 2008 at 12:38 am | Reflections | No comments